Not talking turkey

Why I won't be telling you what to eat or drink this Christmas. Plus: what I've been drinking this week

Decisions, decisions: turkey or porchetta this Christmas?

CHRISTMAS presents a culinary and alcoholic assault course for us all. But spare a thought for wine critics, for whom this season also entails the gruelling ritual of writing festive wine recommendations.

I hasten to assure you that I will not be doing so in this piece.

For a start, it can be exhausting to do extra tastings for a seasonal slot. For my first Christmas column as the London Evening Standard’s wine critic in 2005, I hadn’t yet been to enough press tastings to pull together sufficient recommendations. So I conscientiously tasted and re-tasted the 40-odd samples I called in – all on one evening at home. The result: I got utterly wasted and had to face my in-laws hungover for lunch next day – though I did arrive at some solid wine suggestions (Saintsbury Carneros Pinot Noir with turkey).

More important – and with no disrespect to my friends Victoria Moore and Fiona Beckett, who write brilliantly on the right wine for food – carefully choosing wine to accompany Christmas dinner is even more of a triumph of vinous ambition over dining reality than wine matching is normally.

The kind of matching so beloved of American foodies collapses as soon as people at the same restaurant table order different dishes. Alsace Riesling with halibut in orange-miso sauce and fennel salad? Doubtless tasty, but not much use when others are eating seared beef, seafood pasta and mushroom risotto.

And then at Christmas you have several dishes all on your own plate: turkey, pigs-in-blankets, roast potatoes, sprouts, bread sauce.

So you need an all-rounder wine that can cope with the contrasting flavours and textures – and calorific overload. Anything big enough to stand up to it all, really. Or just carry on drinking champagne throughout?

Yet on the critics go, making turkey-friendly suggestions year after year. It was ever thus. Celebrated wine critic Hugh Johnson had his first piece published in Vogue in December 1961, titled… Talking Turkey. His wine recommendations to accompany the festive bird were, of course, claret and red Burgundy: Château Lafite 1949 (Dolamore & Co, 39 shillings) or a 1928 Pommard (Hatch Mansfield, 27/6).

Even more entertaining are the diktats of the first British TV celebrity chef, the formidable Fanny Craddock. Her 1968 classic, Coping with Christmas, was republished last year with a droll foreword by Felicity Cloake. Its pages are full of dishes to raise a nostalgic smile for my 1970s childhood (prawn cocktail, chocolate swiss roll) as well as creations mercifully absent from my early years (snails in puff pastry, cold oxtail in aspic, Brussel sprout soup).

And the wines? Craddock recommends starting your festive meal with melon boats (“barquettes de melon”) accompanied by an 1864 Madeira, and pairing turkey with a 1964 Fleurie or, for a fancier choice, a 1953 Charmes Chambertin, red Burgundy being the traditional choice for the bird.

More recently, the most honest attempt I’ve seen at determining what works best entailed writers from Decanter magazine gamely sitting down in August, circa 2010, to an all-the-trimmings Christmas dinner. They then tested around a dozen wine options to destruction; the overall favourite was a white Burgundy.

I’m refusing to follow suit not just because of the wine-matching challenges but simply because roast turkey is one of my least-favourite dishes. Indeed for this Christmas Day, I have secured agreement from my whole extended family that we will eat not the most overrated poultry on Earth, but porchetta. I somehow doubt mine will match up to the herb-stuffed, falling-apart porky glory of porchetta as served in a Tuscan market, but it will be more interesting than an overgrown North American chicken costing £100.

And the wine: before our meal, we will drink the Wine Society’s Champagne Brut NV, made by the ever-reliable Alfred Gratien. With our pork-fest (there will obviously be pigs-in-blankets too) I will open a magnum of Château Musar 2012 – a Lebanese wine to celebrate a Holy-Land event.

Fanny Craddock would almost certainly disapprove. Though were she still with us, she would no doubt join me anyway in wishing everyone a very happy festive season.

Coping with Christmas: Fanny Craddock and loyal sidekick, Johnnie, in action.

What I’ve been drinking this week

Franck Massard “El Mago” Garnacha Tinta 2021, Terra Alta – I praised a red from this slightly obscure Catalan region last week and now here’s another. I enjoyed this at the ever-excellent Barrafina with tapas: soft, spicy Garnacha fruit, supple tannins, fresh acidity (Perfect Cellar, Shelved Wine, The Great Wine Co from £16.65.)

Skyphos Xinomavro 2019, IGP Macedonia – from the Artisans Vignerons de Naoussa co-op (no, I don’t know why Greek winemakers have given themselves a French name), this includes grapes from outside the Naoussa region, so it’s labelled as a more humble IGP. But it boasts classic xinomavro flavours: sweet red fruit well balanced by firm acidity and tannins, long and savoury (The Sourcing Table, £19.20.)

François Villard “Les Contours de Deponcins” Viognier 2020, IGP Collines Rhodaniennes – a Condrieu in all but name, though since the grapes come from just outside the boundary of that illustrious appellation, it qualifies as only an IGP. As fine a demonstration as you could wish of why this (or rather Condrieu) is the Rhône’s greatest white wine: gorgeously rich, sweet peach and apricot fruit yet dry and beautifully balanced with acidity. The friend who served it to me got it en primeur from the Wine Society: worth watching out for (2020 N/A UK; Mr Wheeler Wine, Terra Wines have other recent vintages, from £25.)